


The Itsy Bitsy Spider

by JustMightBeAJellyfish



Series: Scintillating Fractures [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Black Hermione Granger, Dumbledore isn't bad, Manipulative Albus Dumbledore, Neglected Harry Potter, Ron Weasley is a great friend, and needs hugs, just manipulative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 10:32:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14830610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustMightBeAJellyfish/pseuds/JustMightBeAJellyfish
Summary: Avada Kedavra depends on someone's will to kill. Ron Weasley has never felt a larger urge to kill something than when he saw a spider creeping up his leg. With all the stubborn will of a child, he wishes for the complete annihilation of spiders. And it works. Sort of. All the spiders in his house fall dead.





	The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Ron stole the twins’ toy broom. Well, technically, it was Charlie’s old toy broom. And Ron wouldn’t have done it if the twins had just shared like their mum had said to! Really, it was their fault for not being nicer. They should have been.

Ron zoomed through the air, just fast enough that he could pretend that it was on a real broom. Flying was awesome, he decided, right before he bumped into something. Someone. Someones.

“You have-” said George or at least, the one wearing a sweater with a G.

“-our broom,” finished Fred.

“Mum says you need to share!” Ron said defensively as he clambered up from the ground.

“Did she now?” Asked one twin scowling.

“You’d think she’d tell us herself.” The other continued, also scowling.

_She had_ , Ron thought to himself. _Yesterday and the day before yesterday and the day before that too._

But the twins were not rationally thinking about what had and hadn’t happened. While Ron might think that he was the only one who felt he was the worst of the bunch, the leftovers, the one who could only ever get hand-me-downs, the twins felt that way too. Pranking would help them express themselves, it would give them the attention that was always being forced elsewhere but they hadn’t learned that quite yet.

The broom had been _theirs_. Sure, it had been Charlie’s before it was theirs, but it was theirs. They owned it; it was theirs. And Ron, Ron had just tried to take it. So the twins scowled and planned revenge.

That night Ron went to bed slightly worried, but full of the childish belief that he was bulletproof. That nothing could ever truly hurt him. Other people got hurt, not him.

Ron opened his eyes when suddenly his bear felt … weird. Slowly, the blurred image became eight shining eyes and eight spindly legs and a grotesque, hair body.

With a yelp Ron threw himself backwards and the spider, its hairy legs brushing his skin, scampered off into a corner of his small, cramped room.

Ron heard the thud of footsteps before the door cracked open and light flooded his room. His mother looked at him, tired but full of love, and Ron could feel the dent in the bed as she sat down.

Looking at his parents, Ron felt an overwhelming trust that they’d make whatever hurt him go away.

“What’s wrong?” asked Molly, pushing the hair away from his forehead and tucking it behind his ear.

Ron pointed at the corner. “The spider,” he whispered.

“Well,” announced Arthur after going over and picking up the bear and checking for spiders, “it’s gone now. Though, your bear was-”

Ron stared at the bear, wide eyed horror. “But- but it was a spider! You have to believe me, it was a spider!” Ron looked at his parents desperately, begging them with his eyes to believe him.

“Oh, Ron,” Molly sighed. “You sure that you weren’t having a nightmare?"

“It wasn’t,” Ron protested. “It wasn’t a nightmare. It really was a spider!”

“Ron, neither you mum or I transfigured your bear into a spider and who else could of?” Arthur said, placing the bear on the covers where Ron glared mutinously at it.

“The twins could have,” Ron muttered petulantly.

“The twins did not transfigure your bear!” said Molly. “And I don’t want to hear you accusing them.”

Ron rolled over, away from them, and pulled the blankets tighter.

“Just – just try to get some sleep,” pleaded Arthur, before he and Molly left the room.

In the morning, Ron maneuvered the blankets to get the bear to fall of the bed and quickly pulled the blankets off the ground. He proceeded to ignore the bear for the rest of the week.

As it lay on his bedroom floor, Ron spent quite a bit of time outside of his room and avoided the twins to the best of his ability.

Bill had taught Ron chess over the summer. It was a fun game; Ron had even started beating Bill occasionally by the end of the summer.

Ron was paying a game with Percy, both of their pieces moving slowly across the board. Ron had just moved his rook and had gleefully crowed, “chess mate!”

Percy nodded imperiously and said, “Good job, Ron,” in an effort to be what his father had told him was called the “bigger man.” The whole look was rather ruined by the fact that he was nine and cleaning his glasses on his shirt for what had to be the hundredth time.

It was then that Ron felt something on his leg, a small tickle of movement. His body froze. _Just a hair,_ he thought to himself, slowly casting his eyes towards his leg. _Just a –_

It was not a hair. The spider was brown and common. Ron had seen ones like it before; he had killed ones like it before. But all Ron could imagine was glassy black eyes and prickly, spindly legs, the feeling of those legs across him as he cradled a gigantic, disgusting travesty of nature, an abomination of all that is good in the world. The spider had just crawled off his sock and was creeping up his leg and in that moment all Ron wanted was every single spider in the world dead.

It truly is a testimony to strength of a child’s will that in that second every single spider in the Burrow was enveloped in a green light before falling to the ground dead. Ron Weasley was the youngest caster of an unforgivable.

There are several facts that all combined and made it so that everyone could not just forget and not realize what Ron had done.

The first was that Percy had seen.

The second was that the Burrow did not have very good wards. Even decent wards were expensive and the Weasleys had seven children with very real needs and wants, so the Weasleys did not have the best wards.

The third was that ministry charms to detect and locate unforgivables were still strong. After all, though it had been four years after Voldemort’s defeat, there were still death eaters out there. Not many, but every two months or so, Azkaban would claim another death eater who did not cover up their tracks well enough and did not have enough to bribe their way out.

The fourth, and probably most important, was that Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, was an idiot. Dolores Umbridge, the secretary to the Minister of Magic, and Fudge both felt the alarms go off. Though Amelia Bones, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, also felt them go off, Umbridge quickly (and in a sickly sweet tone) informed her that “the Minister had it covered; you mustn’t let yourself be distracted by it.”

Fudge, firmly in Lucius Malfoy’s back pocket, knew of the Malfoy-Weasley feud (it had been gossip hundreds of years ago). However, the man was an idiot and would not have thought of how that might be related to the use of an unforgivable at the Burrow until Umbridge had mentioned that if he harmed the Weasleys that Lucius might … favor him even more.

The two of them and a squad of aurors marched up to the Burrow and knocked. Molly and Arthur were obviously bewildered. However, when the Minister was yelling and the aurors were looking threatening, Percy told the truth. He did not think of what would happen to Ron, because why would they punish a child’s _accidental_ magic. No one would stand for it.

So little, nine-year-old Percy rushed in front of his parents and yelled, “It wasn’t them!”

Fudge sneered in a pale imitation of Lucius’s sneer and said “So who did it then? You?”

“Of course I didn’t!” Percy said, tall and proud and self-righteous, everything a Weasley should be. “It – it,” Percy lost his momentum here, because how does one go about saying that their little, five-year-old brother used the killing curse on every single spider. “It – Ron was scared, you must understand, and it was accidental magic! I’m sure he didn’t mean for all the spiders to die, they just … did.”

On the testimony of his older brother, Ron was immediately sized and thrown into Azkaban. The auror that did it turned in his resignation letter right after he came back from Azkaban. Amelia did not try to stop him; she just asked if he would come to give a statement. The auror give a curt nod and left.

The Weasleys went straight to Dumbledore and demanded that he help. And he did. Everyone was at Fudge’s throat, fear backing their actions. _If he did that to the Weasley child_ , and here the whispers were usually punctuated with _A Weasley!_ or a _A Child!_ before they were continued the thought. The thought everyone was wondering: _what will he do to us? To our children for their accidental magic?_ Even Lucius opposed the minister’s actions, for both public reasons and private ones. Because it would be social suicide not to and what would that idiot do it his son if given the chance?

Ron was quickly taken out of Azkaban, though quickly in politics is forever anywhere else. Though Fudge, Umbridge, and Crouch were all ultimately fired, they defending their position and loathed to even let an inch be surrendered.

A month after Ron was taken to Azkaban he was let out. And though a month may seem short, to a five-year-old child it is an eternity. For a child who constantly had dementors surrounding it - gorging themselves on fresh, new happiness, and a child’s ripe joy - every second must hold the infinity promised in the spaces between stars. Slowly time unwinds like molasses being poured from its bottle. In this cold, frigid, molasses time Ron slowly withered away.

Ron’s mind became a satire for happiness, trapping him in memories of the spider, of the twins’ look of loathing, of that time Bill called him annoying, when Charlie told him to find someone else to bother, when Percy dismissed him. When Molly looked at him, so very disappointed, and asked him to leave, telling him that she was busy with his sister. But the bad memories were easy to deal with. It was the unending feelings of unwantedness, uselessness that were poured over his memories, like ink over photographs until his memories were mockeries of what had been happiness, that truly hurt. The corruption of everything he had loved was what cut into him, made him gasp for breath and sob. The feeling of everything he loved being ripped away from him left Ron sobbing on the ground, begging for the help of pagan gods that his ancestors had long since abandoned.

One of the aurors who came with Arthur to take Ron away is a rookie. He was fresh out of Hogwarts, had blurry memories of Voldemort’s war. Idealistic, naïve, even a bit of a pacifist and so, so inexperienced, the hat spent minutes debating over Hufflepuff or Gryffindor. He vomited after he and a more experienced auror cleared the dementors from where they were hovering around Ron's cell, vomited what felt like more than he’d ever even eaten and then gagged, stomach acid dripping from his lips, when he saw Ron, pale and gaunt, his small body laying broken against the dark stones of Azkaban, his only sign of movement in the periodic shivers that wracked his tiny frame.

Ron was lead into St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. He spent a year there, all paid for by the Ministry that was given to them along with a hefty amount of money that the Weasleys put off for Ron and only Ron. (No one argued when Molly announced this, no one spoke at all. It seemed that it has been years since anyone said anything other than what is necessary.)

When Ron came out St Mungo's he is physically healthy, but he didn’t smile. He flinched away from his family, woke up whimpering every night (He stopped screaming when his throat become too sore to support his voice). Molly cried late at night, the twins didn’t make jokes, Bill tried to decide if he wanted to be a mind healer instead of a curse breaker. They all still tried to smile and pretend everything will go back to the way it was.

Years pass and Ron grew closer to Ginny (The dementors couldn’t corrupt happiness that never existed). Ginny left behind the Harry Potter books and tried to mature for her older brother that smiles awkwardly and can’t stand even a passing mention of spiders, but broke his arm catching her when they snuck outside to fly and didn’t even flinch.

Bill became a curse breaker; he didn’t have the potions grades necessary for mind healer, as Snape is a biased git. He struggled through it all the way to seventh year but Snape refused to give him the O he needed. Charlie went off to Romania to become a dragon tamer, but he bought a two-way mirror and periodically checks in. The twins are sorted into Slytherin for their determination and ambition to make the whole world smile. They still take up pranking and jokes, but the jokes are less crude and the pranks are less cruel. The twins humiliated Gryffindors that bully first year snakes, badgers, ravens, and lions. They bully bullies right back and though Snape will mentally admit they are potion geniuses, his classes never escape unscratched when he tried to unfairly take away points or to humiliate a student. Everyone is slowly, but surely, healing.

The Weasleys helped a boy to platform 9 3/4, though they were much more subdued. But the boy with shockingly green eyes and black hair grinned at Ron and Ron felt himself hope, for the first time in such a long time, that he can truly be happy again.

 

           

 

           


End file.
